“I am very glad you all like me,” she said. “Till tomorrow. Then goodbye.”
He went and she was alone. The words of their conversation seemed still to be floating in the silence, like vanishing atoms. Then the silence became complete, and Cecile sat motionless, leaning back in the three little cushions of the chaise-longue, black in her crêpe against the light of the lamp, gazing out before her. All around her descended a vague dream as of little clouds, in which faces shone for an instant, from out of which came low voices without logical sequence of words, an aimless confusion of recollection. It was the dreaming of one on whose brain lay no obsession, either of happiness or of grief, the dreaming of a mind filled with peaceful light; a wide, still, grey Nirvana, in which all the trouble of thinking flows away, and the thought merely wanders back over former impressions, taking them here and there, without selection. For Cecile’s future appeared to her as a monotonous sweetness of unruffled peace, where Dolf and Christie grew up into boys, students, men, while she herself remained nothing but the mother, for in the unconsciousness of her spiritual life she did not know herself.
She did not know that she was more wife than mother, however fond she might be of her children. Swathed in the clouds of her dreaming, she did not feel there was something missing, by reason of her widowhood; she did not feel loneliness nor a need of someone beside her, nor regret that yielding air alone flowed about her, in which her arms might shape themselves and grope in vain for something to embrace.
The capacity for these needs was there, but so deep hidden in her soul’s unconsciousness that she did not know of its existence, that one day it might assert itself and rise up slowly, up and up, an apparition of clearer melancholy. For such melancholy as was in her dreaming seemed to her to belong to the past, to the memory of the kind husband she had lost, and never, never, to the present, to an unrealised sense of her loneliness.
Whoever had told her now that something was wanting in her life would have roused her indignation; she herself imagined that she had all she wanted; and highly she valued the calm contentment of the innocent egoism in which she and her children breathed, a contentment she thought complete. When she dreamed, as now, about nothing in particular – little dream-clouds fleeing across the field of her imagination, with other cloudlets in the wake – sometimes great tears would well in her eyes, and trickle slowly down her cheek; but to her these were only tears of an unspeakably vague melancholy, a light load upon her heart, barely oppressive, and then for some reason she did not know, for she had ceased to mourn the loss of her husband. In this manner she could pass whole evenings, simply sitting dreaming, never oppressed with herself, nor reflecting how the people outside hurried and tired themselves, aimlessly, without being happy, while she was happy; happy in the cloudland of her dreams.
The hours sped, and her hand was too heavy to reach for the book upon the table beside her; heaviness at last permeated her so thoroughly that one o’clock arrived, and she could not yet decide to get up and go to her bed.
II
Next evening, when Cecile entered the Van Attema’s drawing room, slowly, with languorous steps, in the sinuous black of her crêpe, Dolf advanced towards her and took her hand:
“I hope you will not be annoyed. Quaerts called, and Dina had told the servants we were at home. I am sorry …”
“It does not matter!” she whispered back, a little irritated nevertheless, in her sensitiveness, at unexpectedly meeting this stranger, whom she did not remember ever to have seen at Dolf’s, who now rose from where he had been sitting with old Mrs Hoze, Dolf’s great-aunt, Amélie, and the two daughters, Anna and Suzette.
Cecile kissed the old lady, and greeted the rest of the circle in turn, welcomed with a smile by all of them. Dolf introduced:
“My friend Taco Quaerts … Mrs Van Even, my sister-in-law.”
They sat a little scattered round the great fire on the open hearth, the piano close to them in the corner, its draped back turned to them, and Jules, the youngest boy, sitting behind it, playing Rubinstein’s Romance in E, and so absorbed that he had not heard his aunt come in.
“Jules …” Dolf cried.
“Leave him alone,” said Cecile.
The boy did not reply, and went on playing. Cecile, across the piano, saw his tangled hair and his eyes abstracted in the music. A suspicion of melancholy slowly rose within her; like a weight it climbed up her breast and stifled her breathing. From time to time forte notes falling suddenly from Jules’ fingers gave her little shocks in her throat, and a strange feeling of uncertainty seemed winding her about as with vague meshes; a feeling not new to her, in which she seemed no longer to possess herself, to be lost and wandering in search of herself, in which she did not know what she was thinking, nor what at this very moment she might say.
Something dropped into her brain, a momentary suggestion. Her head sank a little, and, without hearing distincdtly, it seemed to her that once before she had heard this romance played so, exactly so, as Jules now played it, very, very long ago, in some former existence long gone, in just the same circumstances, in this very circle of people, before this very fire; the tongues of the flame shot up with the same flickerings as from the logs of ages back, and Suzette blinked with the same expression she had worn then on that former …
Why was it that she should be sitting here again now, in the midst of them all? Why should it be, sitting like this round a fire, listening to music? How strange it was, and what strange things there were in this world! … Still, it was pleasant to be in this company, sweetly sociable, quiet, without many words, the music behind the piano dying plaintively away – until it suddenly stopped. Mrs Hoze’s voice had a ring of sympathy as she murmured in Cecile’s ear:
“So we are getting you back, my child? You are coming out from your solitude again?”
Cecile pressed her hand with a little laugh:
“But have I ever hidden myself? I have always been at home.”
“Yes, but we had to come to you. You have always remained at home, have you not?”
Cecile laughed again quietly.
“You are not angry with me, are you?”
“No, dear, of course we are not angry; you have had so much sorrow.”
“Yes; I seem to have lost everything.”
How was it she suddenly realised this? She never had had any feeling but of contentment in her own home, among the clouds of her daydreams, but outside, among other people, she immediately felt that she had lost everything, everything.
“But you have your children …”
“Yes …”
She answered faintly, wearily, with a sense of loneliness, oh! terrible loneliness, like one floating aimlessly in space, borne upon thinnest air, in which yearning arms grope in vain.
Mrs Hoze stood up. Dolf came to take her into the other room to play whist.
“And you too, Cecile?” he asked.
“No; you know I don’t …”
He did not press her; there was Quaerts and the girls who would play.
“What are you doing there, Jules?” he asked, glancing over the piano.
The boy had remained sitting there, forgotten. He now rose and appeared, tall, grown out of his strength, with strange eyes.
“What were you doing?”
“I … I was looking for something … a piece of music.”
“Don’t sit moping in that style, my boy!” growled Dolf kindly, with his deep voice. “What’s become of these cards again, Amélie?”
“I don’t know,” said his wife, looking about vaguely. “Where are the cards, Anna?”